How To Get Your Hands on a Glastonbury Ticket – It’s all about showing each other the love

Last week on Sunday, tickets for Glastonbury 2019 were released and caused chaos online for those looking to get a slice of the action. After a taking a “fallow year” for 2018, the appeal was world-wide as people queued up online and tried to get their ticket. There were reported ‘record numbers’ this year for those trying and they sold out within a record-breaking 35 minutes, 15 minutes quicker than 2017.

Among those hopeful festival-goers was 90% of PrettyGreen. Many tried, but only a couple actually succeeded. One of our Creatives, Dan was among those who tried, and we learned how him and his mates went about getting their hands on elusive tickets to the ‘biggest festival in the world’.

“I’ve been to a fair amount of festivals over the years but never the mighty Glastonbury, so ignorantly I was calm and not worried about getting a ticket after my mates all agreed that this year was finally the year we all do Glasto together. It soon became pretty clear that this was not gonna be the case.

My group is of about 15 friends and one of them has been a Glasto regular for long enough now that she assured us newbies in the group that there was nothing to worry about and she had a way that had worked for her for years.

Before you do anything, you need to pre-register. This stops the bots and scalpers from buying up all the tickets and selling them on for more money and makes the odds fair for everyone. You have to upload a recent picture of yourself and enter your details, it’s like handing over your CV, praying that they’ll accept your mugshot and send you a registration code. They did accept mine fairly quickly, and then I got my code. I was in! Then I remembered that I hadn’t even begun the actual process yet.

My friend (the Glasto regular) had been doing a group syndicate for ages, which means having your details added to a Google doc that we could all access, then put into teams of 6 (as you can buy a maximum of 6 tickets) and all sharing registration details within your team. The Google doc has been used for many years so has acquired more names each year, so after my group were added into the syndicate it came to 82 members in total which is A LOT of PEOPLE.

My team was filled with some of my closest friends, as were the team after me, plus a few more dotted about in random teams. We set up a Whatsapp group, made sure we all had access to each others registration details and the ‘leader’ of the group had agreed to use her bank details for the deposit when one of us got in, which we would then all send our £50 to her.

Sunday came. It was tense, we felt like we had been prepping for war.

Another tactic we used was to try and log on using multiple devices. I personally had my phone and my laptop with two web browsers open on the Glasto home screen, and everyone dusted off all their old iPads and tablets they could find and had them set up ready to go, hoping that just one screen would magically display the purchase screen.

To add to the pressure, even if you do get to the purchase screen you must enter all details for each member correctly first time or risk a high chance of being booted back to the queue and being shamed for your incompetence.

I had got up at 8 (on a Sunday!!), showered and made my coffee, and got set up.

You could feel everyone was on edge, all shouting at each other to GET READYYY on the individual chat groups, and as it hit 9am, it was radio silence.

In true British fashion we waited in the virtual queue, mashing the refresh button every few seconds in hopes of getting through. So we waited….

…and waited

…and waited

…..and waited

… I started panicking.

Nothing was happening. 15 minutes in, and no update from anyone. I kept checking the Glastonbury twitter feed between my fingers wishing not to see the “sorry we have sold out” tweet that was inevitable any minute. Another 5 minutes pass and now people are starting the “what if we don’t..” talk. But then…

24 minutes in and my friend types in the team chat “Done. We’re in”. VICTORY IS OURS!!!

I couldn’t believe it, he bloody did it. He managed to get through on his phone. I had to ask him if he was serious but he was and our group out of 15 in our syndicate had been one of two so far to get in.

Now that we were in we kept trying for the other groups.

Eventually, my other full group of friends had gotten in, as well as couple of other groups in the syndicate. Everyone was pumped, it was going so well, we had about half of the syndicate in when the tweet went live that they had sold out.

It only took 35 minutes and it was all over. What an emotional rollercoaster. We ended up with exactly half, 42 out of 81, with tickets which considering the odds really isn’t bad.

So what does this mean now for those that didn’t get tickets?

There is a ticket resale in April for all the remaining tickets that either didn’t get paid for or cancelled from now til then, and we can do the same process again but this time with the same amount of people trying for half the tickets, so the odds are still pretty good that we’ll get more people in but time will tell.

I am extremely grateful and so hyped that I got mine though, and I can’t wait for June. Now I need to go get some wellies.”